The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

One thing we collect for our semiannual ranking factors survey is the opinions of a group of SEO experts (128 of them this year!) about the relative weights of the categories of ranking factors. In other words, how important each of those categories is for SEO relative to the others.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some key takeaways from the results of that particular survey question. In addition, the pie chart below shows what the categories are and just where each of them ended up.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard and a fancy version of the chart from this week's video!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm going to talk a little bit about the ranking factors survey that we did this year and specifically some of the results from that.
One of my favorite questions that we ask in our ranking factors survey, which happens every two years and goes out to a number of SEO experts. This year, 128 SEO experts responded, sort of folks who were hand chosen by us as being very, very knowledgeable in the field. We asked them, based on these sort of thematic clusters of ranking elements, things like domain level link authority versus page level keyword agnostic features, weight them for us. You know, give a percentage that you would assign if you were giving an overall assessment of the importance of this factor in Google's ranking algorithm.
So this is opinion data. This is not fact. This is not actually what Google's using. This is merely the aggregated collective opinions of a lot of smart people who study this field pretty well. This week what I want to do is run through what these elements are, the scores that people gave them, and then some takeaways, and I even have an exercise for you all at home or at the office as the case may be.
So interestingly, the largest portion that was given credit by the SEOs who answered this question was domain-level link authority. This is sort of the classic thing we think of in the Moz scoring system as domain authority, DA. They said 20.94%, which is fairly substantive. It was the largest one.
Just underneath that, page-level link features, meaning external links, how many, how high-quality, where are they coming from, those kinds of things for ranking a specific page.
Then they went to page-level keyword and content features. This isn't just raw keyword usage, keyword in the title tag, how many times you repeat on the page; this is also content features like if they think Google is using topic modeling algorithms or semantic analysis models, those types of things. That would also fit into here. That was given about 15%, 14.94%.
At 9.8%, then they all kind of get pretty small. Everything between here and here is between 5% and 10%. A bunch of features in there, like page-level keyword agnostic features. So this might be like how much content is in there, to what degree Google might be analyzing the quality of the content, are there images on the page, stuff like this. "How fast does the page load" could go in there.
Domain level brand features. Does this domain or the brand name associated with the website get mentioned a lot on the Internet? Does the domain itself get, for example, mentioned around the Web, lots of people writing about it and saying, "Moz.com, blah, blah, blah."
User usage and traffic or query data. This one's particularly fascinating, got an 8.06%, which is smaller but still sizeable. The interesting thing about this is I think this is something that's been on the rise. In years past, it had always been under 5%. So it's growing. This is things like: Are there lots of people visiting your website? Are people searching for your domain name, for your pages, for your brand name? How are people using the site? Do you have a high bounce rate or a lot of engagement on the site? All that kind of stuff.
Social metrics, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc., domain-level keyword usage, meaning things like if I'm trying to rank for blue shoes, do I have blue shoes in the domain name, like blueshoes.com or blue-shoes.com. This is one that's been declining.
Then domain-level keyword agnostic features. This would be things like:
What's the length of the domain name registration, or how long is the domain name? What's the domain name extension? Other features like that, that aren't related to the keywords, but are related to the domain.
So, from this picture I think there's really some interesting takeaways, and I wanted to walk through a few of those that I've seen. Hopefully, it's actually helpful to understand the thematic clusters themselves.
Number one: What we're seeing year after year after year is complexity increasing. This picture has never gotten simpler any two years in a row that we've done this study. It's never that one factor, you know, used to be smaller and now it's kind of dominant and it's just one thing. Years ago, I bet if we were to run this survey in 2001, it'd be like page rank, Pac-Man, everything else, little tiny chunk of Pac-Man's mouth.
Number two: Links are still a big deal. Look here, right? I mean what we're essentially seeing in this portion here is domain-level link authority and page-level link features, all of them. You could sort of think of this as maybe page authority being a proxy for this and domain authority being a proxy for this. That's still a good 40% of how SEOs are perceiving Google's algorithm. So links being a big important portion, but not the overwhelming portion.
It has almost always been the case in years past that the link features, when combined, were 50%. So we're seeing that they're a big deal both in the page and domain level, just not as big or as overwhelming as they used to be, and I think this is reflected in people's attitudes towards link acquisition, which is, "Hey, that's still a really important practice. That's still something I'm looking forward to and trying to accomplish."
Number three: Brand-related and brand-driven metrics are on the rise. Take a look. Domain level brand features and user usage or traffic query data, this is comprising a percentage that actually in sum exceeds page-level keyword content and features. This is really kind of the branding world happening right here. So if you're not building a brand on the Web, that could be seriously hurting your SEO, maybe to the same degree that not doing on-page optimization is. Actually, that would be a conclusion that I personally would agree with as well.
Number four: Social is still perceived to have a minor impact despite some metrics to the contrary. So, social you can see up here at 7.24%, which is reasonably small. It's the third-smallest factor that was on there. And yet, when we look at how do social metrics correlate with things that rank highly versus things that rank poorly, we're seeing very high numbers, numbers that in many cases exceed or equal the link metrics that we look at. So here at Moz we kind of look at those and we go, "Well, obviously correlation does not imply causation." It could be the case that there are other things Google's measuring that just happen to perform well and happen to correlate quite nicely with social metrics, like +1s and shares and tweets and those kinds of things.
But certainly it's surprising to us to see such a high correlation and such a low perception. My guess is, if I had to take a guess, what I'd say is that SEOs have a very hard time connecting these directly. Essentially, you go and you see a page that's ranking number nine, and you think, "Hey, let me try to get a bunch of tweets and shares and +1s, and I'm going to acquire those in some fashion. Still ranking number nine. I don't think social does all that much." Versus, you go out and get links, and you can see the page kind of rising in the search results. You get good links from good places, from authoritative sites and many of them. Boom, boom, boom, boom. "I look like I'm rising; links are it."
I think what might be being missed there is that the content of the page, the quality of the page and the quality of the domain and the brand and the amplification that it can achieve from social is an integral part. I don't know exactly how Google's measuring that, and I'm not going to speculate on what they are or aren't doing. The only thing they've told us specifically is that we are not exclusively using just +1s precisely to increase rankings unless it's personalized results, in which case maybe we are. To me, that kind of hyper specificity says there's a bigger secret story hiding behind the more complex things that they are not saying they aren't doing.
Number five, the last one: Keyword-based domain names, which I know have been kind of a darling of the SEO world (or historically a darling of the SEO world) and particularly of the affiliate marketing worlds for a long time, continue to shrink. You can see that in the correlation data. You can see it in the performance data. You can see it in the MozCast data set, which monitors sort of what appears in Google and doesn't.
Our experience reinforces that. So remember Moz switched from the domain name SEOmoz, which had the keyword SEO right in there, to the Moz domain name not very long ago, and we did see kind of a rankings dive for a little while. Now almost all of those numbers are right back up where they were. So I think that's (a) a successful domain shift, and I give huge credit to folks like Ruth Burr and Cyrus Shepard who worked so hard and so long on making that happen, Casey Henry too. But I think there's also a story to be told there that having SEO in the domain name might not have been the source of as many rankings for SEO-related terms as we may have perceived it to be. I think that's fascinating as well.
My recommendation, my suggestion to all of you, if you get the chance, try this. Go grab your SEO team or your SEO colleagues, buddies, friends in the field. Sit down in a room with a whiteboard or with some pen and paper. Don't take a laptop in. Don't use your phones. List out these features and go do this yourself. Go try making these percentages for what you think the algorithm actually looks like, what your team thinks the algorithm looks like, and then compare. What is it that's the difference between kind of the aggregate of these numbers and the perception that you have personally or you have as a team?
I think that can be a wonderful exercise. It can really open up a great dialogue about why these things are happening. I think it's some fun homework if you get a chance over the next week.
Until then, see you next week. Take care.

I have to say I'm pretty amazed there's nothing in here on Freshness, Rand. I know it's not just your own results here and it's from a survey but still, surely someone picked up on it and mentioned it to you guys.

Search results across the board are ranking purely on their date and not on how many links they have, how many social shares the site has, how old the domain is, how relevant the content is and so on. I'm monitoring dozens and dozens of sites who just keep faking their date every few days and their rankings go straight back up. I shared a case study on this myself a few days ago where I do not deserve to rank but I do purely on freshness (i.e. the date of my blog post).

I know we discussed this on your blog a few months ago Rand where I really didn't agree with you continuing to preach the whole 'focus on quality content' model (at least without sharing other ideas), but I really think Moz should be covering things like this as well, I can't think of a category above that freshness would fit into. For some results it's almost 100% of the weight, which is wrong in my opinion, but I can't say I'm not taking advantage of it.

I would love the webmaster guidelines to really be around what actually works for ranking and what you shared on your personal blog, but I don't think many of us can say that really seems to be the case. I do wonder if your survey and recent blog posts would be different if you guys still worked with clients...

I hear you Glen. There's certainly been some circles in the SEO world concerned about the temporary but powerful impact of recency/freshness. I've seen cases of it being overused, but plenty of unaffected (or reasonably affected) SERPs as well.

One thing I will address regarding the "working with clients" issue. There's definitely something lost from not having clients, but I don't think perception of Google's rankings is one of them. In fact, my sense over the past 4 years vs. the 7 before that is that today, I/we get to see a much broader picture and perspective, and feel far less biased by what's happening in a given subset of rankings that may affect a client or a set of sites, vs. what we get to see across a broad swath of keywords (like the Mozcast dataset or the buckets our data science team tested for the ranking factors).

That could just be a foolish pipe dream, but I'm usually really hard on myself and on Moz in general, and in all the logic and self-reflection I can muster, I think it's the truth (with no offense and no intent to discount meant to those who do have clients or do focus on a limited set of SERPs for their own business - that's what matters to you, and that makes it hugely important).

Appreciate your reply. I know you get more discredit than most when it comes to some things but that's purely because you guys are at the top of this game. As I mentioned on the Shoemoney call-out of here a few days ago, I would rather marketers (especially new ones) end up on this blog than any other.

That being said, what I was really referring to is the 'emotion' that comes from rankings. Seeing a site you've put so many hours in and built millions of natural links for getting dominated by freshness, spam or anything else that goes against what is a 'natural' link profile. I remember posts from you in the past where you have been surprised at other sites that outrank SEOmoz (previously) for various SEO terms when you don't think they should and you've mentioned those very sites.

Even if I don't agree with calling out sites - I've done it myself, sure - I used to love those blog posts from you guys because you would get stuck in and look at why others are outranking individual properties rather than looking at it from a far-out entire algorithm kind of thing. Not sure if that last sentence makes sense.

I think being involved in a lot of niches you're passionate about and seeing this situation where you're 'unfairly outranked' over and over again does give you a very different perspective IMHO rather than just looking the, albeit huge, dataset you guys have.

It was a really solid and very fair comment and critique. I totally agree that the passion of seeing a site you know deserves to rank get unfairly pushed below utter crap is one of those things I/we definitely miss.

Re: freshness specifically - I believe we did run some correlation on publication date and recency of publication, and may have those results in the final ranking factors when Matt (Peters) publishes it (probably ~3-4 weeks away). That might help be more of an unbiased arbiter of how many SERPs are seeing recency (in the absence of other factors) dominating top rankings.

p.s. I don't at all mind being criticized or called-out. I think we have a higher bar than most, but that's as it should be. Those who are seen as leaders should be held to a higher standard.

This is what I find hilarious, even in your findings (Red, Blue & light Green) that a site with some keywords onpage and a keyword optimized title/description along with a couple 1,000 quality links will rank for pretty much any keyword.
This is what I've been trying to tell people when they say "black hat isn't long term" and I've finally come up with the perfect answer:
No, YOUR black hat isn't long term.
For some very odd reason, all white hats (I'm grey hat, feel free to judge) seem to think that black hatting a site to #1 means spamming 10s of 1,000s of links in a very short amount of time, but what if we just created 1,000?
Let's say those 1,000 links were contextual, all from different referring domains and from manually spun content (Which would make the content itself perfectly readable) that's 1,000 quality links that could be manually reviewed and you'd be perfectly fine, fire in a couple 100 niche blog comments, some web 2.0 profiles and a few private network links and you dominate SERPs... It's tried and tested (I've run it myself on well over 120 sites). My site network of over 70 sites has been running this method since Penguin first came out in April 2012 and I've had 1 site penalized (I recently found out it was only a partial penalty and am working on fixing it).
I agree with Glen about the point that Moz doesn't discuss a lot of topics, such as Black hat SEO for example - Or they do, but when they do they discourage completely from using it and present it horrifically. Carson said spinning is bad, but failed to mention manual spinning which I know even a lot of white hats do for using same articles for different guest posts. He also used site networks like BuildMyRank which were massively public, horribly structured and de-indexed very easily, without using the "proper" black hat networks such as SAPE/BHW Networks, not to mention underground/truly private networks.
I'd really like Moz to get back to the way it was where you guys tested everything, and not just Google approved garbage.

Oh I completely agree that it'd go against Google, but why not? It's not exactly "fair" to show only a portion of our industry or when you do show the other areas, show them from the worst perspectives possible...
I'd be up for the challenge of re-doing Carson's entire post from my perspective as someone who's properly succeeded with black hat.

Charles - as you well know, there's hundreds if not thousands of places on the web to find content related to black and gray hat practices. Moz isn't one of them and we're not going to be. I'm challenged to understand the value in complaining.

I didn't even watch this video because SEOMoz is so full of fluff. I went straight to the comments to see what people were saying, and I was really surprised to see such a great, honest comment by Charles_SEO. Bravo, sir.

And Glen at ViperChill has brought up some great points that don't seem to be mentioned in this SEO authoritative Moz video.

Moz is so invested in pleasing Google and providing information that Google wants to hear, they really aren't a great source to learn about real SEO anymore.

How many people here have followed Moz's tired suggestions about creating great content? How many people linked to you after creating this amazing content?

And how many of you follow Google's terms of service and Matt Cutts' Webmaster Tools videos word for word? How are your sites doing? How are your clients' sites doing? Just wondering.

815 - I know I shouldn't take the bait, but I just can't resist. How is it that you both A) "didn't even watch this video" and yet B) know things that "don't seem to be mentioned in this SEO authoritative Moz video."

I have read many illogical comments, but rarely one framed so succinctly.

Rand, as you know I'm a big fan of Moz's content and I've been a little twisted into content marketing myself. Hence why I class myself as a grey hat because I do both... I follow Guidelines and create content when it comes to some projects and kick Google's ass with my BH techniques when it comes to others.
I'm just afraid that as Moz is the #1 resource for SEOs out there, that you aren't justly displaying every part of marketing...
Also a really nice suggestion I had for Moz was a Moz News section? Have the latest news from the IM community, this'd be a great way to promote the latest G Update rather than having to wait a week for Phil or Cyrus to release a big post on it.

Thanks for the comment. I really didn't expect a direct response or anything.

I've been on Moz and SEOMoz enough over the last few years that the pictures included under the video gave me the overall idea of the video, which is why I didn't watch it. Makes sense to me.

And I'm not saying Moz is a bad place to learn about SEO. It's the place I turned to when I was first interested in SEO a few years ago. There's tons of great info here and the content is always great and very detailed.

And I love the SEO tools Moz provides. I use them at my job pretty much every day (well, 5 days a week). I do a lot of competitor research at my job and, unfortunately, I see grey hat tactics killing it over and over again in Google SERPs—even for some very competitive keywords.

So, I just really never see any grey hat suggestions posted on Moz. That's why I feel like there are some tips and advice that are left off of Moz and these videos. It's mostly the white hat, create great content, try to promote it, and sit back and slap high fives while your website rises to the top.

Sorry to be a little critical. I respect how you and others have grown this site over the years, giving yourselves the opportunity to create great tools for people like me to use. However, I think Moz is kind of like the Yankees of SEO, so there will be some people like myself that will be a little critical at times. Cheers! (Not sure about Moz's employee steroid usage policies, however.)

Actually I agreed with ViperChill and strongly on his last paragraph about webmaster guideline.

But, honestly i was in wonder after reading his comment, i am eagerly want to know one thing that from which type of survey or you can say that from which type of survey platform you got this data? If you Don't mind.

I can clarify your whole chart with detail just from google guidelines and some tactics which is very generic sense and a symbol of loyalty.you can also say it as a common and geniune human logic with proven examples.

Right now, for everyone, the burning and polite question from clients is: How much time it will take to achive bla bla bla..

Freshness wasn't considered a ranking factor category by itself, but it was included into one of those listed (the page level keyword-agnostic features, if I remember well the huge questionary Moz sent me for the Ranking Factor 2013).

I do wonder if your survey and recent blog posts would be different if you guys still worked with clients...

I, and all the others 127 SEO contacted for doing the survey, are active SEOs working with real clients (or for our own sites or in-house), so I think that the "perceived" ranking factor pie can be considered a representation of what SEOs on the trenches think. So, that "if you guys still worked with clients" really doesn't fit here.

It would have been nice to see that mentioned in the video if that was the case. I did watch it and saw nothing about that at all, and not really a hint about it. Of course it may have been forgotten, but if it was in the questionnaire it should have been mentioned here?

Are you telling me you didn't mention these things then (how well spam is working, especially on Youtube, link networks cleaning up, freshness, etc.) in your response?

Would be amazed if none of you are seeing this. I can't seem to stop seeing it...

And your last sentence; I didn't say that at all, but the overall blog post would be different in this summary.

Looks like freshness/publication date was included in the "page-level, keyword-agnostic features" but it wasn't specifically called out in its own section.

As far as the 128 SEOs surveyed - they come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but the most common was consultant/agency, followed by in-house, and very few folks like me who aren't involved in the day-to-day of earning rankings.

When we did the survey there was obviously a free field for adding personal insights to the answers we were giving, so I am sure all those topics were described there by me and other SEOs.

As I am sure that they will be eventually used and published whenever Moz will publish the results of the survey in its totality here.

I think that this is also just WBF, hence with limited time for explaining something and describing the most important things coming out from the survey.

Not that what you told is not important, it is (and I personally loved and shared your post, partly contributing to its freshness success :)), but - if I consider that the focus of the WBF was presenting the big picture, to say so. Let's wait the final document (when Rand/Cyrus?) for a granular dissection of it.

Thank you ViperChill. Was insightful to read your thoughts. Equally, interesting post by Rand. That in itself was refreshing, ironically, considering there was nothing about content refresh as Viperchill pointed out. But I think fresh content is one of the typical responsibilities of any web manager running a website; it's not I believe spoken about with any fervour or relevancy because of its organic and expected nature. Like cleaning your house or eating, something you're not told to do because you get on and do it.

I didn't thought that this WBF would start a great discussion in comments - but it is.

and very few folks like me who aren't involved in the day-to-day of earning rankings

thats it - sometimes you have to start link building instead of earning, u have to do these spammy SEO with "no" quality links. We tried to show other options - but so many clients just want to see how much backlinks per month - and they are not interessted in talk about it. Than Ok - get your spammy links, don't think about fresh content just think Links...

We still should not forget that authorities can be wrong. Just look up the history of medicine what the majority of experts thought about a specific subject (e.g. when mercury was used to "cure" many thing).

But it is very nice to see the opinion of others. Thank you Rand for the insights.

Great WBF as usual but I would love to see what the same group of SEOs anticipate these factors will look like (or "should" look like) in a years time (or even further).

For instance, how will Social Factors look in a few years time Vs links? Is it safe to anticipate Social Signals will take a bite out of the perceived weight of links eventually? How will personalised results weigh in?

In the future, I would personally like to see less weight on links in favour of more usability / brand / social signals to give more power to sites that are doing a better job of keeping users happy (and building a brand) rather than focusing on acquiring links before anything else.

Many sites are still frustratingly benefiting from ignoring everything but creating links and outranking sites that are focusing on creating a better experience. In this respect I share ViperChills frustrations with seeing sites rank well that clearly shouldn't and until Google do a better job then I think those that follow the "rulebook" are going to be equally as frustrated for some time to come.

Awesome to see domain level brand features / brand citations being considered. In my experience building a brand and citations are becoming fubdamental for all kinds of projects not just local search. It seems once you've built a strong recognised brand online it makes it easier to rank. I created a basic video about this a while ago http://www.koozai.com/tv/branding/how-to-be-seen-as-a-brand-by-the-search-engines/ and I think this factor will continue to increase in importance.

In recent updates, lots of website lost ranking and got disappeared from the Google Search results, many of the Internet Marketing Experts are wondering to get the solutions, some of them have changed the content (to secure their website from Panda) and someone stopped getting backlinks (avoid Penguin). But the fact is that they all are not aware about the Ranking Factors.

I know lots of SEO Professionals trying to get rank without knowing the current ranking factors, they are developing Second Floor of that building which is not having the Ground Floor.

This post has described very effectively the topic - "what should be the format of getting backlink and what should be your anchor text."

The image used in the post is very effective; i loved the image as it is saying more than the description mentioned below. An effective and very useful post.

I would love to see all 128 SEO's who worked on this, create their own Pie chart for 2014-2015 in order to see what they think the ranking factors are heading to. What will increase and what factors will decrease?

We at Seo München believe that SEO is speculation not science. Seo could be at best called analytical evaluation of factors that influence rankings. Google is the only one to know their own alogo. So a survey of how other SEOs perceive Google ranking factors is a great idea to accumulate data.I appreciate the data of today's WBF. Thanks very much, Rand for doing this survey!

Of course everyone of us is viewing Seo factors based on his/her own experience and viewpoint. To get data what other SEOs believe has influenced their work (the survey Rand did) is an approach to structure and analyse ranking factors which is a method of data evaluation that is being used in many fields where there are unknown factor involved. Of course every SEO gives credit to his / her own favorite SEO methods but it is still very valuable to know what experience and conclusions other SEOs have made.

"The only thing they've told us specifically is that we are not exclusively using just +1s precisely to increase rankings unless it's personalized results, in which case maybe we are. To me, that kind of hyper specificity says there's a bigger secret story hiding behind the more complex things that they are not saying they aren't doing."

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This was my favorite part of your WBF. Too many double negatives to know what the heck you were trying to say. Any help?

Otherwise, I look forward to your homework assignment. Grab a nice bottle of wine, some of my smart SEO friends and sit around and wax poetic on ranking factors. I'm a nerd!

Wanted to check this one out on Friday (like it's supposed to be), but didn't have the time. Not much new actually on this video, but still interesting. Would be fun to sit around with my SEO team to see what we all think about those ranking factors since I think it also depends per country and market you are in. Let's say that the Dutch people use way more Google+ than in the states, then our 'social factors' might become much more important. The opposite effect is possible as well (some ranking factors being less important). Thanks!

Nice topic. I'm really surprised to see 'Domain Level keyword usage' coming in at a lower percentage - I still see, more often then not, those domains continuing to outrank those that may not have keywords in the URL, even when other metrics aren't as substantial (DA, PA, etc). How quickly would you say this is declining as a ranking factor?

ive been playing around with keywords on linking pages recently trying to better steer campaigns where one page targets multiple terms. the more focus i give the on page content the quicker my head term rises in the serps, the broader the focus the more the head term suffers.

Amazing White Board Friday!! Good to see the statistical depiction of the Ranking factor as per the Google algorithm.. really amazing stuff to share and informative post as always. Thank you once again Rand for the insightful post.

Very useful post. Unfortunately what applies for the USA market is not necessary efficient for other markets. For example for the Greek market it seems that what is by far more important up to now is the number of backlinks and secondary the usage of the main keyword in the title.

The numbers in this survey are very similar to what I have for my team, and I've updated this list a couple of times this year. No doubt that links is still the main factor and that the brand issues are on the rise - we can see that a lot in the last 6-12 months.

What's extremely interesting to me is what you said about social, it seems like everyone are talking about social in the last couple of years but for me not only that it’s still a relatively small traffic source we also don't feel that its yet a serious SEO ranking factor. Of course things are totally different when we talk about personalization, this is when Social really comes into action.

The only thing that I personally give a bigger weight to is the User, Usage data -> I think that the Bounce rate for example is underrated!

Social matrices not that big like the one I have been expecting.Social media with any doubt is being playing a crucial role in ranking these days and I can surely say that this percentage is going to jump up above 10% next time.
Most crucial factors are domain level and page level links which are sigh of reliefs for SEO guys as their is lot of debate on SEO is dead.

The fact the analysis is based on the opinion of different SEO experts and not directly to real facts could imply a certain error level. What would be nice to see in another article is the mathematical algorithm experts are using for calculating the weights for each different factors ( not sure all use real algorithms or intuition only ), and the number of factors they were analyzing as there are still few important ones which seems to be missing.

The analysis is focused on Google Algorithms but is not specified if Local Algorithms were included or not, as it seems they are totally missing ( all those backlinks analysis which doesn't mater so much for Local Rankings anymore ) and Local Rankings are taking over Google SERPs, at least this is what my laptop screenshot shows: http://goo.gl/5tuzUE ( no organics, only carousel, maps & AdWords )

Many of us are filling the pain of being outranked because of this local stuff and would love to hear more updates about this.

Interesting pie chart, Rand. Do you think that there might be a uniform pattern of perceived dominant factor if we qualify according to the types of business markets? For instance, could social be perceived to have major impact in the case of professional services market? It might also be interesting to see the perceived impact of factors depending on the geographic market – whether local or international. Thanks for another awesome whiteboard Friday experience!

Great whiteboard Friday Rand. I will definitely be bookmarking this page, so I can come back to it for future review. The one thing that I believe that stands out, which is somewhat of a surprise to me and may be to most is that social metrics of Google +1's, doesn't play as much as an adverse role. The only reason I bring this up, is because earlier this year (keep in mind this was a review done in March - April of 2013), some of our team's websites (blogs) that were recognized by a few Google +1's, had a much higher page rank. Now of course the information that we displayed, our keywords, who we were targeting, etc. obviously had to play a great role on the status of this increase of page rank. I'd really like to see what other SEO individuals, like yourself Rand, have to say a little bit more on the fact of Google +1's!

"Social metrics, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc., domain-level keyword usage, meaning things like if I'm trying to rank for blue shoes, do I have blue shoes in the domain name, like blueshoes.com or blue-shoes.com. This is one that's been declining."

OnPage factors we've a little higher and socials aren't that high. Still Domain Level KW is a little higher (in our suggestion) but we also think it's on a way down (SEOmoz to Moz was a great example for that).

We put socials on 5% and domain level keyword on 7.5%. Social only 5% cause (I) think its more about the UX factor via visitors from socials help u - they help u in staying on your website, return and so on - I think (just like rand and the 128 SEOs) that this is a big growing fact. And socials are just a good way to support that - so it's not that big direct ranking factor. Domain and Page Level/autority are also nearly equal here.

So the most is really similar-
we just see socials as supporter for let me call it "empathy" ranking factor - the user experience - you can get visitors on your site via socials - much visitors (maybe persons wich would never type in any of your keyword phrases in google) - thats a fact. When these people stay on your site read your topic u get the user experience - they share and u get more users - maybe with the same interesst, they will take a look and stay longer and read deeper when a friend shared it.

So thats the difference in our opinion - domain level keywords are currently high ranked - may be it is not because the keyword in the domain, but thats what we are used to think about these sites.

We have to come away from the keyword thinking SEO model - thats what we believe - so we also have to come away from Domain Keyword - (I really don't like these KW domains, they are ok if u want to rank for one topic - otherwise it's a bit annoying)

This was a good WBF and the comments brought up a lot of good issues currently affecting the SEO community. Personally, I have not been into SEO long enough to have much knowledge about the "black hat" techniques. Additionally, my niche clients are not the type that would take the risk involved in using these. However, I agree with some of the commenters that without a total perspective on the industry it is hard to get the full picture of the developments and trends. If for no other reason, being informed of all tactics can help an SEO evaluate why another site may be beating them in the rankings. Rand, much kudos for addressing the comments openly, and I think the comments of people that don't agree with you shows the respect they have for MOZ. It has been a great place for people of all SEO skill levels to come and get information.

Re: "there's a bigger secret story hiding behind the more complex things that they are not saying they aren't doing." ~ Social interactions, connections, networks, shares and related social factors are being crunched by Google every second. Social will have a much greater influence on the algorithm in the future.

Re: "Hey, let me try to get a bunch of tweets and shares and +1s, and I'm going to acquire those in some fashion. Still ranking number nine. I don't think social does all that much." ~ Short term thinking.

Offline mentions of brand? Mentions of brand in press? (I'm assuming any mentions online aren't occurring with a backlink, otherwise it'd be in the linking categories). Sounds like it could get a little dicey, especially for brands with often used keywords (cars.com, shoes.com, etc). But maybe then again, I'm not sure if the cars.com of the world are really dominating search right now.

This is a survey going out to 128 experts who all have different backgrounds, and different thoughts about what SEO is. I have been doing this for a while now and I have met most of the top people in the industry, both from the US and the UK, and so far I don't think I have met 2 people that will give the same answer to what the perfect SEO strategy for any given website is. There is just to many things that matters, and the strategies is different depending on nisch.

My takeaway from this is that Social, "the hip thing", is probably even lower then this chart tells us, because there are so many people defending the value of Social for SEO. I really can't see any value, and the correlation mentioned is probably attached to something else. The most active companies on Social are probably a lot more aware of online marketing for example.....
And links are probably worth more then the piecharts say, because a lot of people are "on-page" guru's that believe writing good content and tweeting about it is enough for a page to be optimized because they work with low competitive keywords.

You should also realize that those pie charts could be divided if we were talking about different sorts of SEO.

If you were talking about sex or viagra for example, I am pretty sure everyone in the survey would agree that Social Metrics have 0 importance.
And if you would be looking at local SEO, I am pretty sure everyone would agree that the EMD's would increase in value as low competition keywords with local relevance often only need decent content, a link or two, and the freshness factor mentioned by Viperchill, to outrank "far better optimized" websites.

Don't just look at the numbers and expect Rand / Moz being right or wrong.
Think about what it means, take away some of the thoughts mentioned, and if you are in total disagreement (what I thought Social was 65%!) with the piecharts, then maybe it is time to re-think your own SEO.

Nice video as usual Rand. I would really see a video in the future where you discuss Social for SEO. How and why it would work, because I just can't see it being in the algorithm even though I believe social is insanely important for Branding and Traffic Generation, especially in some niches.

Always great to get feedback from a variety of SEO's to help paint a picture.

My only question on this (that doesn't seem like it's been asked yet) is about the social media aspect. Is it just that selling social media as part of the SEO mix is difficult or is it that people like you and Cyrus who do really technical data stuff can't get enough information to show causation of social media factors?

I know Cyrus has had it out with Matt Cutts saying surely followed links on the G+ system must pass page rank, even if the +1's themselves are not explicitly a factor. But is there anyway to, if not prove, at least imply a level of causation from Social Media?

We are currently collecting social sharing tag information across our client base and I intend on collating and analysing that out alongside other data to see if anything can be garnered from that, when other factors are excluded, but as I'm not an expert analyst, I was hoping to get some brainstorm ideas from someone here about some way to finally begin to imply causation (even if the answer is 'nil'). Because in the least, Social media sends traffic, we get sales through social alone, but although we can show traffic we are still judged by ranks :)

Rand, one thing sticks out here: You said, "The only thing they've told us specifically is that we are not exclusively using just +1s precisely to increase rankings unless it's personalized results, in which case maybe we are."

The "they" here is Google.

Does anyone not get personalized results with every search? Maybe someone using a computer at a public library, but other than that it seems all results are personalized. So Google's statement to you is like me saying that I don't eat granola, except on days that have a "y" in them.

Thanks Rand for posting this.
"how important each of those categories is for SEO relative to the others", this is the real matter of the article. If I earn more links and planning a quality backlinks strategy, I really need to have Page-Level and keywords feature so a real unique and valuable content and so a good topic modeling score on the page. I mean, every single thing is related to the next. Only if I have an awesome content I get great benefit from a trusted domain that links to me. Links are still the lion of the web, but only if you have a very good content.

Just because freshness was not mention, it does not mean you can't use your gut instinct. Out of 14.94% of "Page Level Keywords + Content Feature", I would go for around 35% to 45% for content freshness.

I'm just "getting into" SEO and find everything fascinating at the moment. Although I've been messing around on the web for a while - the onsite and offsite aspects of ranking a site organically is tough but fun. Like a huge puzzle that if you get a piece wrong you could lose the game. From what I see here though (and other places on the web), there are 3 main factors (the big wedges) - get them right and then slot in the other little time-consuming factors around those 3 and you should have the upper hand on your competitors. Could this be a step by step method for an action-plan? Is there a step by step method?

Great WBF and perspectives in the comments. The key takeaway for me from the collective SEO expertise is that the algorithm and SEO is getting more complex. Google+ will continue to impact Google search, both personalized and global which will increase the slice for social in the next survey. With all the discussion of freshness, any way Moz would consider making the survey annual ?:-)

Freshness (over) weighting, IMO, can also be used as incentive to create more quality blog posts so even if/when the freshness factor gets de-emphasized, other ranking factors such as inbound links, social shares, depth of content will be positively impacted.

Love or hate it, the fact today remains that in Internet marketing, outside of a few select countries, it's Google's World and we are just living in it.

I think that one reason we see more correlation in Social is because an effective Social campaign can have a strong influence on the two clusters right next to it on the chart. A strong social campaign can certainly positively affect the brand's value (resulting in more online and offline brand mentions, etc.), and can also improve usage (data from toolbars, etc.) I think things like this are at least a partial reason (perhaps a big part of the reason) there seems to be more correlation than what the SEOs currently think translates to causation.

I personally believe that the pie chart of rank factors importance changes for each and every keyword and then probably changes based on how websites change. (If Keyword1 results start all getting 1000s of links, the algorithm may respond by changing its weighting importance of links and look to other factors.)

If I was asked to answer these in my head, I would have probably come up with a slightly similar distribution. However, I have said it before and I will say it again, in local search, domain level keyword usage still dominates certain terms. I constantly see poor website out ranking quality highly authoritative sites because they have an exact match URL.

I think what Rand has a show is a clear picture to understand how the ranking works in terms of Links. The clusters which Rand has shown, is the actual fact. But I always felt that Social % should increase because its actually an important signal in terms of traffic. I think this clusters can also be customized into many sub clusters. The focus should be on the quality of links & content.

The question here is this is something what some top SEO experts believe in as per their experience. But does it work at every level and in every niche sector? I don't think so. Talk about electrical equipment and tool manufacturers, what social media influence or off media influence we expect from these businesses. These factors might be applicable in top popular sectors like Travel, IT, Finance, Food, Health, etc., but not in all.

Yes, social can be done for all sectors, but in many sectors it doesn't happen naturally. So you have to wonder if it's worth doing.

Take a senior for example, buying a hearing aid. After buying from your site are they likely to tweet about it, click a like button, post it to facebook or any other social network? I highly doubt it. Chances are they don't do social networking and you're not going to get any links from their website or blog as they don't have those either.

If you're lucky they may post a link on their favourite forum, but Google devalued those links a long time ago. In some sectors these were the only natural links people were getting and in my mind a link that's posted (and sticks) on a well run forum is worth more than any tweet or like.

Ever since I started reading blogs at "seomoz" I changed all my SEO methodology, sadly the results are not as I expected, I am not saying these are wrong, but following Google's guidelines blindly isn't working for me. What I think is that charles_seo might be right and we need to do some spinning, linking and baiting.